As I recall, there's also a brief color sequence near the end of Portrait of Jennie--during the climatic storm scene.

Click to expand...

Early color was not that different from early 3D* in that respect. Witness the inexplicable use of 3D in one reel of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and a couple of scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt.

*Early, of course, in the latest cycle of 3D movies. Of course, it also took a few technical innovations before color was widely adopted.

And, bizarrely, War of the Colossal Beast (the sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man) is b/w until the final minutes of the movie--when it inexplicably turns into color.

Click to expand...

Not quite inexplicable as it was done quite literally for the "shock value". After the sister of the titular character convinces him to gently lower a bus of school kids he was going to crush, the Colossal Beast has one last flash of humanity that leads him to conclude it would be better for everyone if he were to 'end it all". Thus he seizes the power lines draping from a tower. The second he does this and the sparks fly, the film switches to color, thus enhancing the sequence.

Could I request that this thread be pinned? It seems to have become a pretty regular feature, and it's a bit hard to track down when it falls off the main page (since the natural search term would be "TCM" but the board's search engine can't handle anything shorter than four characters).

Click to expand...

I PMed Neroon about it, we'll see if he concurs...

ETA: No, he decided not to pin it... we'll survive. Try seaching on "genre", that seems to work well enough.

Tonight, or early tomorrow, we have a movie called Not Against The Flesh-- the original title of which appears to be Vampyr. It's from 1932 and involves shenanigans at a sinister castle, so I'm gonna be all over that one. It's on at 2:30am.

I noticed they had "The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake" the other day. I remember seeing that one when I was young and being spooked. Not sure what I'd think of it as an adult. Anyone have an opinion on the movie? And yes, I do remember how it ends.

^^ I taped it and watched it yesterday. I liked it quite a bit. Definitely a B-Movie of its time, but very nice. It makes good use of the usual tropes of jungle curses, primitive tribes, family crypts, elderly gentleman scientists and beautiful daughters. It's a bit more graphicly gruesome than other movies of the era, I think, given the beheaded bodies. The cast was very good, too.

As for Jekyll and Hyde, there's a nice DVD set that has both the 30s and 40s version on it. I think I've mentioned it before. After watching the 30s version, the 40s version feels more like My Fair Lady than a Horror movie.

I just watched the '31 Jekyll and Hyde. It was a remarkable piece of filmmaking for its day, very technically innovative, with an impressive use of POV shots and clever transitions, particularly the recurring use of diagonal split screens to juxtapose characters and events and convey the theme of duality. I'd love to see a "making-of" featurette or article about it. Plus there were all the transformation effects, of course, and though the dissolves and jump cuts are familiar techniques today, there was one technique used that's still impressive, and that only works in black-and-white. I read about it in The Twilight Zone Companion -- they'd paint the first stage of the transformation makeup on the actor in red (say), then light him through a red filter so it was invisible, and then they'd switch to a green filter so it would fade into view, and he would visibly begin to transform right before our eyes, purely in camera. It was done quite effectively here.

I found Hyde's makeup and behavior more comical than frightening at first, but when it got into his ongoing abusive relationship with Ivy, it became quite chilling and dark. The sexual content was pretty blatant for the era, though I guess I shouldn't be too surprised since it was pre-Code.

I also feel Hyde's appearance was given away too soon. There should've been more mystery about what was going on in that first transformation, some suspense about what the results of Jekyll's experiments were. Heck, in the original story, we didn't find out that Hyde and Jekyll were the same man until after he/they died! True, most of it was told in flashback, which was a very clumsy format for the story, but the movie could've tried to capture some of that sense of mystery.

Just finished watching the '41 version of Jekyll & Hyde, and I agree with with the opinion that it's greatly inferior to the '31 version. Despite being from a rather accomplished director, Victor Fleming, who'd done Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, it was a much less innovative, much more ordinary production than the previous film. The casting was also pretty bad. Spencer Tracy was just too nice a guy to be effectively menacing, and as much as I like Ingrid Bergman, it was kind of painful to listen to her trying to pretend to be a Cockney. Though on the other hand, I think this is the first time I've ever seen a Lana Turner movie, and she was really lovely.

The movie also suffered greatly from the Hays Code. The hand of censorship was so heavy that the movie couldn't really explore or depict what made Hyde so evil. It implied that he was sexually violating and abusing Ivy off-camera, but it was executed so sedately that what we saw onscreen made Hyde seem more just uncouth and annoying than cruel and terrifying, so it never really sold the sense of menace. Jack Dawn's makeup for Hyde was also way too subtle, basically just a wig, a small appliance on the brows and nose, some wrinkles around the eyes, and bushy eyebrows, with the rest being just Tracy bugging his eyes and grinning. Fredric March's Jekyll turned into an apelike brute, but Tracy essentially turned into Burgess Meredith as the Penguin. No, strike that; at least the Penguin was interesting to watch. Plus it was completely ridiculous that nobody could tell that Jekyll and Hyde were the same man. At least Clark Kent had glasses. The whole thing was kind of embarrassing, and greatly disappointing.

Although I guess it's kind of appropriate that of two consecutive versions of DJ&MH, one would be good and the other would be bad.

On the Lana Turner front, you should check out the version of The Three Musketeers where she plays Milady. Plus, as a bonus, you get Vincent Price as Richelieu.

Yeah, the Code really gets in the way sometimes. There's a great 1940's movie about Jack the Ripper, THE LODGER, which is hobbled by the fact that, apparently, they couldn't acknowledge what exactly the Ripper's victims did for a living. So you get lots of dialogue about how the Ripper is prowling the streets of Whitechapel looking for "actresses."

Could I request that this thread be pinned? It seems to have become a pretty regular feature, and it's a bit hard to track down when it falls off the main page (since the natural search term would be "TCM" but the board's search engine can't handle anything shorter than four characters).

Click to expand...

I PMed Neroon about it, we'll see if he concurs...

ETA: No, he decided not to pin it... we'll survive. Try seaching on "genre", that seems to work well enough.

Click to expand...

Just subscribe to the thread, then you can get to it anytime without having to search for it. For anyone who doesn't know how to do that, just click on "Thread Tools" at the top of any thread and you'll see a drop down menu. One of the options says "Subscribe to this Thread". Click on that and go from there. The thread will then be added to your list of subscribed threads which you can access by going to the top of any page and clicking on "Quick Links" and then "Subscribed Threads" in the drop down menu.

Yeah, the Code really gets in the way sometimes. There's a great 1940's movie about Jack the Ripper, THE LODGER, which is hobbled by the fact that, apparently, they couldn't acknowledge what exactly the Ripper's victims did for a living. So you get lots of dialogue about how the Ripper is prowling the streets of Whitechapel looking for "actresses."

Click to expand...

There was some of that here too. Ivy in the '31 version was pretty clearly a working girl, so to speak, but in the '41 they went to some lengths to establish that Ivy wasn't... wasn't... (insert meaningful pause), but was just a fun-loving girl who was "a little too generous" with her affections.

Given the radical difference in censorship, I'm surprised the '41 movie hewed so closely to the '31 film's storyline. I mean, that's a movie that's heavily dependent on the sexual nature of Hyde's relationship with Ivy to demonstrate how brutal and abusive he is. Try to tell the same story with the sexuality swept under the rug and it's rendered hollow. Maybe they should've told a different version of the story altogether, one where Hyde's evil was demonstrated through crime and violence and stuff they could actually show, instead of nebulously implied sexual cruelty. After all, the original Stevenson work doesn't include the Ivy character or the fiancee, and avoids specific description of Hyde's debaucheries aside from a murder or two.